51 research outputs found
Distribution and Use of Knowledge under the âLaws of the Webâ
Empirical evidence shows that the perception of information is strongly concentrated in those environments in which a mass of producers and users of knowledge interact through a distribution medium. This paper considers the consequences of this fact for economic equilibrium analysis. In particular, it examines how the ranking schemes applied by the distribution technology affect the use of knowledge, and it then describes the characteristics of an optimal ranking scheme. The analysis is carried out using a model in which agentsâ productivity is based on the stock of knowledge used. The value of a piece of information is assessed in terms of its contribution to productivity.global rankings, information and internet services, limited attention, diversity, knowledge society
Experience versus Talent Shapes the Structure of the Web
We use sequential large-scale crawl data to empirically investigate and
validate the dynamics that underlie the evolution of the structure of the web.
We find that the overall structure of the web is defined by an intricate
interplay between experience or entitlement of the pages (as measured by the
number of inbound hyperlinks a page already has), inherent talent or fitness of
the pages (as measured by the likelihood that someone visiting the page would
give a hyperlink to it), and the continual high rates of birth and death of
pages on the web. We find that the web is conservative in judging talent and
the overall fitness distribution is exponential, showing low variability. The
small variance in talent, however, is enough to lead to experience
distributions with high variance: The preferential attachment mechanism
amplifies these small biases and leads to heavy-tailed power-law (PL) inbound
degree distributions over all pages, as well as over pages that are of the same
age. The balancing act between experience and talent on the web allows newly
introduced pages with novel and interesting content to grow quickly and surpass
older pages. In this regard, it is much like what we observe in high-mobility
and meritocratic societies: People with entitlement continue to have access to
the best resources, but there is just enough screening for fitness that allows
for talented winners to emerge and join the ranks of the leaders. Finally, we
show that the fitness estimates have potential practical applications in
ranking query results
The egalitarian effect of search engines
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social
activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its
size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users
according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they
create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already
popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own
intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We
reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the
combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users
mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less
popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly
surfing the Web.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 appendices. The final version of this e-print
has been published on the Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103(34), 12684-12689
(2006), http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/34/1268
Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and
recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt
to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our
reliance on online technologies such as search engines and social media may
limit exposure to diverse points of view and make us vulnerable to manipulation
by disinformation. In this paper, we mine a massive dataset of Web traffic to
quantify two kinds of bias: (i) homogeneity bias, which is the tendency to
consume content from a narrow set of information sources, and (ii) popularity
bias, which is the selective exposure to content from top sites. Our analysis
reveals different bias levels across several widely used Web platforms. Search
exposes users to a diverse set of sources, while social media traffic tends to
exhibit high popularity and homogeneity bias. When we focus our analysis on
traffic to news sites, we find higher levels of popularity bias, with smaller
differences across applications. Overall, our results quantify the extent to
which our choices of online systems confine us inside "social bubbles."Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, to appear in the Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology (JASIST
Study, Analysis and Comparison between Amazon A10 and A11 Search Algorithm
The entirety of Amazonâs sales being powered by Amazon Search, one of the leading e-commerce platforms around the globe. As a result, even slight boosts in appropriateness can have a major impact on profits as well as the shopping experience of millions of users. Throughout the beginning, Amazonâs product search engine was made up of a number of manually adjusted ranking processes that made use of a limited number of input features. Since that time, a significant amount has transpired. Many people overlook the fact that Amazon is a search engine, and even the biggest one for e-commerce. It is indeed time to begin treating Amazon truly as the top e-commerce search engine across the globe because it currently serves 54% of all product queries. In this paper, the authors have considered two most important Amazon search engine algorithms viz. A10 and A11 and comparative study has been discussed
Shuffling a Stacked Deck: The Case for Partially Randomized Ranking of Search Engine Results
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page
popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern
search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with
quality, a more elusive concept that is difficult to measure directly.
Unfortunately, the correlation between popularity and quality is very weak for
newly-created pages that have yet to receive many visits and/or in-links.
Worse, since discovery of new content is largely done by querying search
engines, and because users usually focus their attention on the top few
results, newly-created but high-quality pages are effectively ``shut out,'' and
it can take a very long time before they become popular.
We propose a simple and elegant solution to this problem: the introduction of
a controlled amount of randomness into search result ranking methods. Doing so
offers new pages a chance to prove their worth, although clearly using too much
randomness will degrade result quality and annul any benefits achieved. Hence
there is a tradeoff between exploration to estimate the quality of new pages
and exploitation of pages already known to be of high quality. We study this
tradeoff both analytically and via simulation, in the context of an economic
objective function based on aggregate result quality amortized over time. We
show that a modest amount of randomness leads to improved search results
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